SproutCore Amber: A Report by Yehuda | Hacker News Reader

SproutCore Amber: A Report by Yehuda

blog.sproutcore.com

51 pointsjashkenas8 comments

This is Yehuda's m.o. -- take a framework and make it less monolithic before he extends functionality. He's done this with Merb and Rails. These have greatly improved those frameworks. I expect good things from Sproutcore.

Somewhat OT, but perhaps related: I've watched SpoutCore and Rails 3 from a distance. My impression is that Rails 3 is still heavily dependent on Prototype.js (for scaffolding, etc.) though the majority of rails developers switch to jQuery for new projects.

Does the community believe that SproutCore is Rail's future javascript library? I realize that SproutCore is independent of any server infrastructure, but, given Yehuda's involvement in both, it seems fair to ask. Or is it the case that, since SproutCore is all about moving logic to the client, Rails would be a poor match -- too heavyweight to pair nicely with SproutCore?

In my opinion, rails is much to heavy to be the first choice for SproutCore. SC works with data at a JSON/CRUD+search level, which makes for some pretty degenerate rails code. You only need a thin layer to surface data, which is more elegantly provided by PHP or sinatra.

It is not true that Rails 3 is dependent on Prototype.js. It is just that it is what Rails started with. You cannot just get rid of something that will break backward-compatibility.

Btw, Rails 3.1 will start supporting jQuery. https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/708e09448ba41c45f189c6...

That's a commit of mine. But, it won't be in the official release of any 3.0.X. It is currently only on the master trunk and soon it will be released together with Rails 3.1.

To answer your second question, I don't think that anyone in the Rails community will say that SC is the future of Rails 3 even though two of the core contributors of Rails are involved in SC.

And, don't forget that 37 Signals which is the company started Rails is going to release their Cinco javascript framework.

I'm confused how you can say that Rails 3 does not depend on Prototype.js, when if you generate scaffolded views they make heavy use of Prototype. I _do_ understand that you can use Rails 3 without prototype, of course. But it's definitely a dependency of the framework at the moment.

That's great about Rails 3.1 supporting jQuery -- I'm certainly excited about it. I'll go check out your commit...

Interesting about Cinco, I hadn't heard of it.

I wish that scaffolding would go. I've not used it in four years, apart from when inheriting code from Rails-newcomers.

Of all the companies I've worked for that use Rails, almost all of them currently use jQuery and not Prototype -- this includes quite a few of them who are on rails 2.x.

Thanks Yehuda, this is really exciting. My startup (Matygo) launched an SC app a month ago and by far one of our biggest problems has been page load, performance, and size (especially on mobile).

A compile that only included the exact library files needed (and none other) would be the holy grail in this regard (like ProGuard does for java).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com